Best Software for Online Courses in 2026

Every course platform on this list solves the same three problems, hosting your video and lesson content, taking payment from students, and tracking who finished what, but they solve them for wildly different people. A solo coach selling a $200 workshop needs almost nothing an enterprise LMS offers. A university department running accredited certificate programs needs almost everything a hosted marketplace like Udemy refuses to give you.

Here’s where each platform actually earns its place, plus the fee structures that rarely make it into the marketing page.

Quick comparison

Platform	Best for	Transaction fees	Where content lives
Learnomy	Owning your course platform, zero fees	0% on Learnomy’s checkout	Your own WordPress site
Teachable	Solo creators wanting simplicity	0-10% depending on plan	Teachable’s hosted platform
Thinkific	All-in-one with a real website builder	0% on paid plans	Thinkific’s hosted platform
Kajabi	Marketing-heavy course businesses	0%, but premium monthly price	Kajabi’s hosted platform
Podia	Budget-conscious creators	0% on paid plans	Podia’s hosted platform
Udemy	Marketplace discovery, no marketing needed	Udemy takes 37-63% depending on traffic source	Udemy’s marketplace

Learnomy

Learnomy is a free, standalone LMS built for WordPress, and the detail that separates it from every hosted platform on this list is the checkout: 0% platform fees, ever. Every hosted competitor above takes a cut of your revenue somewhere, a transaction percentage, a payment processing markup, a premium tier gate. Learnomy’s model is different because the software itself is free and self-hosted; you pay for WordPress hosting, which you likely already have, and keep everything students pay you.

Course creation covers video lessons, quizzes, drip content released on a schedule, and completion certificates, the core feature set any serious course business needs, running on infrastructure you actually own rather than rent. That ownership matters practically, not just philosophically: no platform can suddenly change its fee structure on you, suspend your account over a policy dispute, or fold and take your student list with it.

Pros: Genuinely 0% transaction fees on Learnomy’s own checkout, which compounds enormously at real revenue, a $50,000 course business keeps the whole $50,000 instead of losing a meaningful slice to platform fees every month. Full ownership of the course, the student data, and the domain it all lives on. No artificial cap on course count or student count tied to a pricing tier.

Cons: Requires running a WordPress site, which means you or someone you pay handles hosting and updates, a real responsibility hosted platforms remove entirely. No built-in marketplace discovery the way Udemy provides, growth is entirely your own marketing effort. Younger ecosystem than the decade-old hosted incumbents, so fewer third-party plugins and published tutorials exist so far.

Best for: Creators and small institutions who want to keep 100% of course revenue and own their platform outright, rather than renting space in someone else’s ecosystem indefinitely.

Teachable

Teachable built its name on being the easiest way for an individual creator to get a course online without touching code or hiring a developer. Course creation, basic marketing tools, and payment processing come bundled together, and the free plan lets you genuinely test the waters before committing to a paid tier.

Pros: Intuitive course builder that a first-time creator can navigate without a tutorial. Built-in email marketing and basic sales pages included. Strong student experience with a clean, modern interface.

Cons: The free plan carries a real transaction fee, and even paid tiers add processing costs on top of the subscription. Advanced customization is limited compared to a self-hosted option, you’re working within Teachable’s templates, not building something uniquely yours.

Best for: Solo creators who want the simplest possible path from idea to a sellable course, with less concern about long-term platform fees.

Thinkific

Thinkific pitches itself as the true all-in-one option: course creation, a genuine website builder, and light community features bundled together, aimed at creators who want more than a bare course page but less complexity than a full marketing suite like Kajabi.

Pros: Zero transaction fees on every paid plan, a real advantage over Teachable’s fee structure. A genuinely capable website builder means you’re not stuck with a generic course-page template. Community features give students a reason to stick around between lessons.

Cons: The free plan is limited enough that most serious creators outgrow it within their first few courses. Some of the more advanced features, particularly around marketing automation, sit behind higher-priced tiers.

Best for: Creators who want course hosting and a real website in one platform without paying transaction fees.

Kajabi

Kajabi’s whole identity is marketing infrastructure built around courses: email sequences, sales funnels (“Pipelines” in Kajabi’s terminology), and landing pages all included, aimed squarely at creators whose real bottleneck is selling the course, not building it.

Pros: The deepest marketing automation on this list, genuinely comparable to a dedicated email platform bolted onto a course tool. No transaction fees on any plan. Everything, courses, funnels, email, community, lives in one login.

Cons: The monthly price is the highest on this list by a wide margin, and it’s charged regardless of how much revenue the course actually generates. The feature depth means a real learning curve before a new user is using more than a fraction of what they’re paying for.

Best for: Course businesses where marketing and sales funnels matter as much as the course content itself, and the budget supports a premium monthly tool.

Podia

Podia keeps things deliberately simple and affordable. Courses and memberships share one straightforward platform, with digital downloads folded in too, genuinely no transaction fees on its paid tiers, and none of Kajabi’s marketing-suite complexity.

Pros: Priced meaningfully below Kajabi while still cutting out transaction fees entirely. Handles courses and memberships under one roof, plus simple digital products like downloads and ebooks, without needing three separate tools. Clean, uncluttered interface that doesn’t require a training session.

Cons: Marketing automation is real but noticeably shallower than Kajabi’s. Design customization stays fairly basic, this is a functional tool, not a design-forward one.

Best for: Creators who want courses and memberships, downloads included, bundled affordably without Kajabi’s price tag or complexity.

Udemy

Udemy plays an entirely different game from everything else on this list: a marketplace with its own built-in audience of students actively searching for courses, in exchange for a fee structure that takes a serious bite out of your revenue, up to 63% on instructor-referred sales through affiliate channels, and a still-substantial cut even on organic marketplace traffic.

Pros: Genuine discovery traffic that no self-hosted or standalone platform can replicate, students actively browsing to buy, not an audience you had to build yourself first. Zero setup cost to test whether a course topic has real demand.

Cons: The fee structure is the steepest on this list by a wide margin, and Udemy controls pricing, frequently running deep discounts that shrink your per-sale revenue further. You don’t own the student relationship, email addresses and direct communication access stay limited by Udemy’s platform rules.

Best for: New creators validating whether a course topic has demand at all, before investing in building an owned audience elsewhere.

What actually matters when a course does more than video playback

Most course platform comparisons stop at “can it host a video and take payment,” which every tool on this list handles fine. The differences that actually bite show up later, once a course has real students and real completion expectations.

Drip content, releasing lessons on a schedule rather than dumping the whole course at once, matters more than most first-time creators expect. Students who get everything on day one finish courses at dramatically lower rates than students paced through a structured release, a completion-rate gap documented across enough course platforms that it’s no longer a debatable claim. Learnomy, Thinkific, and Kajabi all support scheduled drip release; Udemy, being a marketplace with standardized student expectations, does not give instructors that control.

Certificates matter for a narrower but real slice of the market, professional development, compliance training, anything where a student needs proof of completion for an employer or licensing body. Confirm a platform generates a genuine, downloadable certificate before building a course around that need, rather than discovering the gap after launch. A verification link that lets an employer confirm a certificate is real, rather than a static PDF anyone could recreate in a design tool, is worth checking for specifically if the course serves a professional or compliance audience.

Quizzes and assessments range from a simple multiple-choice check to genuine graded assignments with instructor review. If the course is teaching a skill that needs verification, not just information transfer, weigh assessment depth as seriously as video hosting quality.

The real cost comparison, run the actual numbers

A course selling for $200, one hundred sales a month, twenty thousand dollars in monthly revenue, plays out very differently depending on the platform, and the difference isn’t a rounding error, it’s the kind of gap that funds or starves a real business. On Learnomy, that’s twenty thousand dollars kept, minus ordinary WordPress hosting, typically under fifty dollars a month. On Teachable’s free tier, transaction fees alone take a meaningful bite before the subscription cost is even counted. On Udemy, if half those sales come through Udemy’s own marketing and affiliate channels, the platform’s cut can run past half of gross revenue, turning twenty thousand dollars into something closer to ten.

The gap widens, not narrows, as revenue grows. A platform that takes a percentage of sales scales its take right alongside your success; a flat hosting cost or a fixed monthly subscription doesn’t. That’s the single most important number to model before committing to a platform for the long term, not the feature checklist most comparison articles lead with. Run your own numbers at both today’s revenue and a realistic three-year target before signing anything, since the tool that looks cheapest on month one is rarely the tool that stays cheapest once a course business actually works.

Migrating an existing course between platforms

Nobody picks a course platform expecting to leave it, and then two years later a fee structure changes or a competitor ships a feature that actually matters. Video files, the largest and simplest asset, generally export cleanly from every platform on this list, download the raw files and re-upload them elsewhere.

What doesn’t move cleanly is everything wrapped around the video: student progress records, quiz results, completion certificates already issued, and any community discussion tied to a specific lesson. Losing that trail isn’t a cosmetic problem either. A student who finished 80% of a course on the old platform arriving at 0% on the new one is a genuine support headache, and it’s the kind of thing that only surfaces once the migration is already underway and hard to reverse. Before committing to a platform, check specifically what its export tools actually produce, not just whether an “export” button exists. A CSV of student emails is not the same as a full record of who finished what and when, and losing that history mid-business is a real cost that only shows up during an actual migration, not during evaluation.

Self-hosted options like Learnomy sidestep most of this risk structurally: the data already lives in your own WordPress database rather than a vendor’s proprietary system, so there’s no migration to plan for in the first place if the underlying software itself keeps developing.

Choosing based on what actually blocks you today

If the honest answer is “I don’t know if anyone wants this course,” Udemy’s built-in discovery removes the cold-start problem, accepting the steep fee as the cost of market validation. If the answer is “I have an audience already and just need to sell to them,” Learnomy or Podia keep the most revenue with the least ongoing cost. If the answer is “selling is the hard part, not making the course,” Kajabi’s marketing depth is worth its premium price.

And if the honest answer is “I want to own this business outright and never worry about a platform changing the rules on me,” Learnomy is built specifically for that answer, running on WordPress, a platform that’s outlasted every course-hosting company that’s come and gone since online courses became a real business category. WordPress itself has been around since 2003 and shows no sign of disappearing; the same can’t be said with confidence about every venture-funded course startup currently taking a cut of your revenue.

WordPress course creation beyond the LMS itself

For teams building on WordPress, Tutor LMS and LearnPress are two other established plugin options worth comparing against Learnomy, each with a different balance of features and pricing. A theme built for community engagement, like Reign, adds discussion and profile features around the course experience. And for email marketing tied to student behavior, course completions, enrollment reminders, upsells, FluentCRM connects directly into a WordPress-based course stack. For dedicated student-record tracking alongside course delivery, our student management software guide covers the SIS side specifically.

FAQ

What is the best software for online courses in 2026?

For creators who want to keep all their revenue and own their platform outright, Learnomy is the strongest pick, a free, standalone WordPress LMS with genuinely zero transaction fees. For simplicity with no code required, Teachable remains the easiest hosted option. For built-in student discovery without an existing audience, Udemy’s marketplace is unmatched, at the cost of a steep revenue share.

How much do course platforms actually cost once fees are included?

Hosted platforms range from Teachable’s free tier with real transaction fees, to Kajabi’s premium monthly pricing starting around $149 a month with no transaction fees. Udemy takes no upfront cost but the steepest ongoing cut, up to 63% on some sales channels. Learnomy is free software running on WordPress hosting, typically under $50 a month total, with 0% transaction fees on its checkout.

Should I self-host my course platform or use a hosted service?

Self-hosting on WordPress with something like Learnomy makes sense once you’re confident the course business has staying power and you want to stop paying a percentage of every sale, forever, to a third party. Hosted platforms make more sense for a first course, where speed to launch and zero technical setup outweigh the long-term fee savings you’d get from owning the platform.

Can I sell courses without any ongoing platform fees at all?

Yes. Learnomy specifically charges 0% on its own checkout, so the only ongoing cost is WordPress hosting you’d likely need anyway for any serious web presence. Thinkific and Podia both offer 0% transaction fees on their paid tiers too, though you’re still paying a monthly subscription to the platform itself rather than owning the software outright.

Do I need a separate website, or does the course platform provide one?

Thinkific, Kajabi, and Podia all include a genuine website builder alongside course hosting. Teachable’s site-building tools are more limited, better as a course page than a full marketing site. Learnomy runs on WordPress, meaning your course platform and your main website are the exact same site, no separate tool or subdomain to maintain, no second login for you or your students to remember.